The Teacher Wars Read Online Free

liberal Unitarianism, supported the gradual elimination of slavery and the “re-colonization” of black Americans to Africa, and celebrated American expansion into the West as a sign that God intended the Protestant United States to lead as “a light to the nations”—a phrase he borrowed from the prophet Isaiah. In 1830 he would speak out against President Andrew Jackson’s brutal relocation of Native American families from the Southeast to land west of the Mississippi River.
    Those views were fairly liberal for their time. Lyman Beecher’s faith was not. He preached predestination, the doctrine that holds that a baby is fated from birth for either salvation or damnation, and that his deeds on earth can hardly change the outcome.In riveting sermons, Beecher would sketch a vivid portrait of the death and perdition of sinners, their brows sweating and extremities growing cold as they sunk down to hell.
    Catharine Beecher hated disappointing her father, to whom she was very close. He would even boast that Catharine was “thebest boy he had”—quite a statement coming from a man with seven sons! But she found Bible study “irksome and disagreeable” and chafed against the notion of original sin. How could an unformed child be guilty of all of humanity’s past corruptions? She was far more passionate about poetry than religion; several of her verses were published in journals while she was still a teenager. She earned every academic distinction and then took up the only job considered socially respectable for a young woman of her class: She worked as a finishing school teacher of the “domestic arts”—needlepoint, knitting, piano playing, and painting. In truth, Catharine hated those feminine pastimes. She would later lament the “mournful, despairing hours” she had once devoted to such activities, which were thought to raise a girl’s value on the marriage market. But for Catharine, wage earning was an important goal, at least until marriage. Her mother had died when she was sixteen, and Lyman Beecherquickly remarried. The preacher had a dozen younger children to support, including the future author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
    At a party in the spring of 1822, when Catharine Beecher was twenty-one years old, she met Horace Mann. He had grown up on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston, and was at the time a twenty-six-year-old law student in Litchfield, rumored to have political ambitions. Mann had already heard of Beecher: She was the famous preacher’s iconoclastic daughter, and a published poet, too. Up to this point in his life, Mann, though tall and handsome, had demonstrated almost no interest in women, even pretty ones. (His roommate at Brown University would recall Mann as someone so self-serious that he had committed “not a single instance” of youthful misbehavior.) But Beecher was different. With tightly wound curls framing a square-jawed face, she conveyed a certain harshness, which she had inherited from her father. The young teacher was fascinating not because she was beautiful, but because she was intelligent.
    Beecher and Mann traded thoughts that evening on the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott; later Mann regretted that the conversation had produced only “truisms” on his part, nothing at all “tremendous” to demonstrate the depth of his ideas. But no matter, for Beecher was already engaged to a far more accomplished man: Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a math prodigy who at the age of twenty-four had become Yale’s youngest-ever tenured professor, and had already written several well-regarded textbooks. Fisher had grown up a few farms away from Mann in Franklin, and Mann gossiped in a letter home to his sister that Beecher “is reputed a lady of superior intellect” and would “probably make the Professor a very good help-mate.”
    Impressed as he